The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Many enterprises and their computer systems utilize virtual machines provided by a virtual data center (VDC), such as a cloud service provider (CSP), and other virtualized resources, such as virtual storage, virtual computing resources, or virtual database resources that are accessible through the Internet. Such cloud services may provide a client with many benefits, such as reduced costs, easier scalability, and a reduced administrative burden. However, cloud services also pose new challenges for clients of these services, such as increased security risks. For example, malware, such as viruses, trojans, spyware, rootkits and so forth are constant threats to security. One way to fight against malware is to install antivirus software agents (or other “security agents”) on the virtualized machine which then attempt to identify and/or counter malignant programs and processes. However, in many cases malware will try to circumvent the installed anti-virus software or prevent the anti-virus software from being effective. Furthermore, in a cloud environment, there are even cases where the CSP (or an administrator working for the CSP) may mistakenly identify the anti-virus software as a threat and kill the process executing the security agent. Security agents are generally very resource intensive and thus are often mistaken for a malfunctioning or malicious process by an administrator or software monitoring agent utilized by CSPs. Clients of such cloud services would benefit from solutions that minimize such disadvantages, while requiring low implementation cost and effort.